The Internet of Things: The Promise Versus the Tower of Hacked Babbling Things

The term “Internet of Things”  (IoT) is being loosely tossed around in the media.  But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication, like Internet communication, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets, is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home, in your car, everywhere: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. It has also been called home automation. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so called machine to machine or M2M communication.  The data communication can also terminate in a compute server where the information can be acted on automatically, or made available to the user to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet connected device.

Another key concept is the promise of automated energy efficiency, with the introduction of “smart meters” with data communication capability, and also achieved in large commercial structures via the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design program or LEED.  Some may recall that when Bill Gates built his multi-million dollar mansion on Lake Washington in Seattle, he had “remote control” of his home built into it.  Now, years later, Gates’ original home automation is obsolete.  The dream of home automation has been around for years, with numerous Silicon Valley conferences, and failed startups over the years, and needless to say, home automation went nowhere. But it is this concept of effortless home automation that has been the Holy Grail.

But this is also where the glowing promise of The Internet of Things (IoT) begins to morph into a giant “hairball.”  The term “hairball” was former Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy‘s favorite term to describe a complicated mess.  In hindsight, the early euphoric days of home automation were plagued by the lack of “convergence.”  I use this term to describe the inability of available technology to meet the market opportunity.  Without convergence there can be no market opportunity beyond early adopter techno geeks. Today, the convergence problem has finally been eliminated. Moore’s Law and advances in data communication have swept away the convergence problem. But for many years the home automation market was stalled.

Also, as more Internet-connected devices emerged it became apparent that these devices and apps were a hacker’s paradise.  The concept of IoT was being implemented in very naive and immature ways and lacking common industry standards on basic issues: the kinds of things that the IETF and IEEE are famous for.  These vulnerabilities are only now very slowly being resolved, but still in a fragmented ad hoc manner. The central problem has not been addressed due to classic proprietary “not invented here” mindsets.

The problem that is currently the center of this hairball, and from all indications is not likely to be resolved anytime soon.  It is the problem of multiple data communication protocols, many of them effectively proprietary, creating a huge incompatible Tower of Babbling Things.  There is no meaningful industry and market wide consensus on how The Internet of Things should communicate with the rest of the Internet.  Until this happens, there can be no fulfillment of the promise of The Internet of Things. I recently posted “Co-opetition: Open Standards Always Win,” which discusses the need for open standards in order for a market to scale up.

Read more: Co-opetition: Open Standards Always Win

A recent ZDNet post explains that home automation currently requires that devices need to be able to connect with “multiple local- and wide-area connectivity options (ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, RFID/NFC, GPS, Ethernet). Along with the ability to connect many different kinds of sensors, this allows devices to be configured for a range of vertical markets.” Huh?  This is the problem in a nutshell. You do not need to be a data communication engineer to get the point.  And this is not even close to a full discussion of the problem.  There are also IoT vendors who believe that consumers should pay them for the ability to connect to their proprietary Cloud. So imagine paying a fee for every protocol or sensor we employ in our homes. That’s a non-starter.

The above laundry list of data communication protocols, does not include the Zigbee “smart meter” communications standards war.  The Zigbee protocol has been around for years, and claims to be an open industry standard, but many do not agree. Zigbee still does not really work, and a new competing smart meter protocol has just entered the picture.  The Bluetooth IEEE 802.15 standard now may be overtaken by a much more powerful 802.15 3a.  Some are asking if 4G LTE, NFC or WiFi may eliminate Bluetooth altogether.   A very cool new technology, energy harvesting, has begun to take off in the home automation market.  The energy harvesting sensors (no batteries) can capture just enough kinetic, peizo or thermoelectric energy to transmit short data communication “telegrams” to an energy harvesting router or server.  The EnOcean Alliance has been formed around a small German company spun off from Siemens, and has attracted many leading companies in building automation. But EnOcean itself has recently published an article in Electronic Design News, announcing that they have a created “middleware” (quote) “…to incorporate battery-less devices into networks based on several different communication standards such as Wi-Fi, GSM, Ethernet/IP, BACnet, LON, KNX or DALI.”  (unquote).  It is apparent that this space remains very confused, crowded and uncertain.  A new Cambridge UK startup, Neul is proposing yet another new IoT approach using the radio spectrum known as “white space,”  becoming available with the transition from analog to digital television.  With this much contention on protocols, there will be nothing but market paralysis.

Is everyone following all of these acronyms and data comm protocols?  There will be a short quiz at the end of this post. (smile)

The advent of IP version 6, strongly supported by Intel and Cisco Systems has created another area of confusion. The problem with IPv6 in the world of The IoT is “too much information” as we say.  Cisco and Intel want to see IPv6 as the one global protocol for every Internet connected device. This is utterly incompatible with energy harvesting, as the tiny amount of harvested energy cannot transmit the very long IPv6 packets. Hence, EnOcean’s middleware, without which their market is essentially constrained.

Then there is the ongoing new standards and upgrade activity in the International Standards Organization (ISO), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Special Interest Groups (SIG’s”), none of which seem to be moving toward any ultimate solution to the Tower of Babbling Things problem in The Internet of Things.

The Brave New World of Internet privacy issues relating to this tidal wave of Big Data are not even considered here, and deserve a separate post on the subject.  A recent NBC Technology post has explored many of these issues, while some have suggested we simply need to get over it. We have no privacy.

Read more: Internet of Things pits George Jetson against George Orwell

Stakeholders in The Internet of Things seem not to have learned the repeated lesson of open standards and co-opetition, and are concentrating on proprietary advantage which ensures that this market will not effectively scale anytime in the foreseeable future. Intertwined with the Tower of Babbling Things are the problems of Internet privacy and consumer concerns about wireless communication health & safety issues.  Taken together, this market is not ready for prime time.

 

Yesterday’s Internet Outage In Parts of U.S. and Canada You Didn’t Hear About

How a Tiny Error Shut Off the Internet for Parts of the US and Canada

Reposted from Wired

Lily Hay Newman13 hrs ago

© Joe Raedle

A year ago, a DDoS attack caused internet outages around the US by targeting the internet-infrastructure company Dyn, which provides Domain Name System services to look up web servers. Monday saw a nationwide series of outages as well, but with a more pedestrian cause: a misconfiguration at Level 3, an internet backbone company—and enterprise ISP—that underpins other big networks. Network analysts say that the misconfiguration was a routing issue that created a ripple effect, causing problems for companies like Comcast, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, and RCN across the country.

Level 3, whose acquisition by CenturyLink closed recently, said in a statement to WIRED that it resolved the issue in about 90 minutes. “Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services,” the company said. “The disruption was caused by a configuration error.” Comcast users started reporting internet outages around the time of the Level 3 outages on Monday, but the company said that it was monitoring “an external network issue” and not a problem with its own infrastructure. RCN confirmed that it had some network problems on Monday because of Level 3. The company said it had restored RCN service by rerouting traffic to a different backbone.

 

© Downdetector.com 

The misconfiguration was a “route leak,” according to Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at the DDoS and network-security firm Arbor Networks, which monitors global internet operations. ISPs use “Autonomous Systems,” also known as ASes, to keep track of what IP addresses are on which networks, and route packets of data between them. They use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to establish and communicate routes. For example, packets can route between networks A and B, but network A can also route packets to network C through network B, and so on. This is how internet service providers interoperate to let you browse the whole internet, not just the IP addresses on their own networks.

In a “route leak,” an AS, or multiple ASes, issue incorrect information about the IP addresses on their network, which causes inefficient routing and failures for both the originating ISP and other ISPs trying to route traffic through. Think of it like a series of street signs that help keep traffic flowing in the right directions. If some of them are mislabeled or point the wrong way, assorted chaos can ensue.

Route leaks can be malicious, sometimes called “route hijacks” or “BGP hijacks,” but Monday’s incident seems to have been caused by a simple mistake that ballooned to have national impact. Large outages caused by accidental route leaks have cropped up before.

“Folks are looking to tweak routing policies, and make mistakes,” Arbor Networks’ Dobbins says. The problem could have come as CenturyLink works to integrate the Level 3 network or could have stemmed from typical traffic engineering and efficiency work.

Internet outages of all sizes caused by route leaks have occurred occasionally, but consistently, for decades. ISPs attempt to minimize them using “route filters” that check the IP routes their peers and customers intend to use to send and receive packets and attempt to catch any problematic plans. But these filters are difficult to maintain on the scale of the modern internet and can have their own mistakes.

Monday’s outages reinforce how precarious connectivity really is, and how certain aspects of the internet’s architecture—offering flexibility and ease-of-use—can introduce instability into what has become a vital service.

Ecuador cuts Julian Assange’s internet access: Reuters

Final Act of the Assange and Wikileaks Saga appears to be playing out

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Monday that its founder Julian Assange’s internet was shut down by the government of Ecuador, deflecting blame from the U.S. or British governments which have sparred with Assange for releasing sensitive material.  My earlier predictions that Assange has worn out his welcome at the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, appears to be playing out.  Assange and Wikileaks, originally portrayed themselves as an “international, non-profit, journalistic organization” with no political bias, that releases confidential information form anonymous sources for the benefit of the public. This image has been severely tarnished by Assange’s own statements, and numerous allegations of bias favoring Russia going back to 2011, and Assange’s own statements of a bias against the United States for seeking his prosecution.

Source: Ecuador cuts Julian Assange’s internet access: WikiLeaks | Reuters

Ecuador cuts Julian Assange’s internet access: WikiLeaks

Julian Assange, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks speaks via video link during a press conference on the occasion of the ten year anniversary celebration of WikiLeaks in Berlin, Germany, October 4, 2016. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

By Mark Hosenball | WASHINGTON

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Monday that its founder Julian Assange’s internet was shut down by the government of Ecuador, deflecting blame from the U.S. or British governments which have sparred with Assange for releasing sensitive material.

“We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet access Saturday, 5 pm GMT, shortly after publication of (Hillary) Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speechs (sic),” the statement from WikiLeaks said.

Assange has lived and worked in Ecuador’s London embassy since June 2012, having been granted asylum there after a British court ordered him extradited to Sweden to face questioning in a sexual molestation case involving two female WikiLeaks supporters.

WikiLeaks said Assange lost internet connectivity on Sunday night.

“We have activated the appropriate contingency plans,” added the Twitter message on Monday. People close to WikiLeaks say that Assange himself is the principal operator of the website’s Twitter feed.

The Ecuadoran government offered no immediate comment on the question of internet access, but the country’s foreign minister, Guillaume Long, said Assange remained under government protection.

“The circumstances that led to the granting of asylum remain,” Long said in a statement late on Monday.

The government of leftist President Rafael Correa has long backed Assange’s right to free speech, though the Wikileaks saga has caused some strain in relations with the United States, including the expulsion of diplomats in 2011.

Correa, whose term will end next year, has said he is behind

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who he says he knows personally, in the U.S. presidential election.

“For the good of the United States and the world … I would like Hillary to win,” Correa told broadcaster Russia Today last month.

Over the last two weeks, Democratic Party officials and U.S. government agencies have accused the Russian government, including the country’s “senior-most officials,” of pursuing a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 election.

WikiLeaks has been one of the most prominent internet outlets to post and promote hacked Democratic Party materials. While denying any connection with a Russian hacking campaign, Assange has refused to disclose WikiLeaks’ sources for hacked Democratic Party messages.

Sources close to both the Democratic Party and WikiLeaks say they believe WikiLeaks has acquired as many as 40,000-50,000 emails hacked from the personal accounts of John Podesta, the former White House advisor who now chairs Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Despite Assange’s complaint that his internet connection was cut, WikiLeaks posted on Monday afternoon what it said was a fresh batch of Podesta’s emails.

According to a summary of the latest emails posted on Russia Today, a media outlet with close links to the Russian government, highlights include campaign staff discussions about “galvanizing Latino support” and about how to handle media queries about Clinton’s “flip-flopping” on gay marriage.

What Happens Now That Julian Assange is Implicated in Russian Espionage?

Assange In Possession of Documents Obtained By Russian Intelligence.

Assange Could Lose Ecuadorian Diplomatic Protection and Risk Arrest by United States

The next Bradley Manning?

Lost today in the extraordinary news frenzy surrounding the release of a video tape of Donald Trump making unprecedented lewd and obscene comments about women, was Barak Obama’s announcement that the United States officially and publicly accuses Russia of espionage in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and stealing documents, now in the possession of Wikileaks.  Some may recall Julian Assange’s video interview with Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher about a month ago on this topic.  It seems clear from the Bill Maher interview that Assange is on a jihad against the DNC because Clinton wanted to prosecute him. He has no altruistic motives — it is personal. We have a foreigner trying to influence U.S elections using documents stolen by Russia.

Last week, Assange said that Wikileaks will release more DNC documents by the end of October.  But as I pondered Obama’s announcement today, it dawned on me that the United States surely now considers the documents in Assange’s and Wikileaks possession to have been obtained as result of Russian espionage against the United States.  This puts Assange in much more serious jeopardy than an alleged rape in Sweden.  Its seems highly probable to me that the United States will now criminally pursue Assange for being an accomplice to espionage against the United States.  Should this happen, the Ecuadorian government would abandon Assange, not wishing to damage relations with the U.S.,  and Assange would be quickly arrested by the British government and extradited to the United States.

Assange must have figured all this out, and is tonight trying to deal with the consequences of now being in a position similar to that of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, now serving a long sentence in a federal penitentiary.

U.S. Says Russia Directed Hacks to Influence Elections

Reblogged from THE NEW YORK TIMES

By DAVID E. SANGER and CHARLIE SAVAGE   OCT. 7, 2016

President Obama in the Rose Garden on Wednesday. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from theDemocratic National Committee and from a range of prominent individuals and institutions, immediately raising the issue of whether President Obama would seek sanctions or other retaliation for the cyberattacks.

In a joint statement from the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security, the government said the leaked emails that have appeared on a variety of websites were “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” The emails were posted on the WikiLeaks site and newer ones under the namesDCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.0.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said. It did not name President Vladimir V. Putin, but that appeared to be the intention.

For weeks, aides to Mr. Obama have been debating a variety of possible responses to the Russia action, including targeted economic sanctions and authorizing covert action against the computer servers in Russia and elsewhere that have been traced as the origin of the attacks.

The statement said that the recent “scanning and probing” of election systems “in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” but did not say the Russian government was responsible for those probes.

The president’s aides have also been debating whether to publicly attribute the attacks to Russia. Mr. Obama had decided against taking that stance in other cases where cyber techniques were used to steal tens of thousands of emails from the unclassified system of the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As recently as Wednesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, refused to accuse the Russians of the cyberattack, even while talking at length about how to secure the American election system from foreign data manipulation and information warfare.

The administration’s announcement came only hours after Secretary of State John Kerry called for the Russian and Syrian governments to face a formal war-crimes investigation for attacking civilians in Aleppo and other parts of Syria. Taken together, the two moves mark a sharp escalation in Washington’s many confrontations with Moscow this year.

With little more than a month to go before the presidential election, Mr. Obama was under pressure to act now on the hacking, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations. The timing of Friday’s announcement was decided in part because a declaration closer to Election Day would appear to be political in nature, the official said.

The subject came up in the first presidential debate, with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee and a former Secretary of State, blaming Russia for the attacks. Her Republican rival, Donald J. Trump, said there was no evidence that Russia was responsible, suggesting that the Chinese could be behind it, or it “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

The question now is how Mr. Obama might respond without setting off an escalating cyberconflict. One possibility is that the announcement itself — an effort to “name and shame” — will deter further action.

The identification of Russia was hardly a surprise: In late July, American intelligence officials told The New York Times that they had “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee.

The hack led to the resignation of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, as chairwoman of the committee, after the leaks suggested the committee had favored Mrs. Clinton in the nominating fight over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

LinkedIn Microsoft Merger Raising More Questions Than Answers

The World’s Most Connected People Have Disappeared From LinkedIn

The most connected members of LinkedIn have vanished. What does this mean for you?

BY CANDICE GALEK

Founder and CEO, Bikini Luxe@bikiniluxe

Amidst news of LinkedIn being bought by Microsoft, one mystery remains: Where have all of the “Super Connectors” gone? It appears that the website built on making connections might frown upon having too many.

Most users on LinkedIn have under 500 connections. There is a subsection of LinkedInusers who are connected to hundreds of thousands of people. Individually Steven Burda and Zura Kakushadze have accumulated more connections than the majority of people in your office combined. Their accounts, along with a slew of others have vanished.

It’s impossible to determine exactly how many of their accounts were deactivated, mostly because outside of LinkedIn messages nobody knows how to reach each other. Their voices have been lost. While they wait in limbo for an answer as to when their accounts will be reinstated, we can only make assumptions as to what the real reason for their disappearance is.

Kakushadze earned his Ph.D in Theoretical Physics, has over 11 years of experience in quantitative finance, and has published over 100 scientific papers. Burda has a background in finance, IT, and accounting but feels at home as a social media consultant. To say that their loyal followers are missing out on their teachings is an understatement.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but I wanted to know why they were deleted. Did they violate the terms of service? Did they somehow game the system, lie, cheat, or steal? I was able to contact the top two most connected users to get their side of the story.

How Many Connections Is Too Many?

LinkedIn is built on the expectation that you can build your professional identity and discover opportunities online. Mutual friends on LinkedIn introduced me to these two Super Connectors who felt as though they had grown too large of a following, and were banned because of it.

When I was a child I cared for a friend’s pet hamster while she was away. I knew I had to feed him, but I didn’t know how often. One day, I emptied the whole box of food into the cage and let the hamster eat as it pleased. I came back to check in on little Hammie, and to my dismay he had passed away.

I later learned that he had eaten himself to death. He didn’t know any better, food was good, it helped him to survive.

The same goes for LinkedIn users whose businesses thrive on the platform. Why were they given the ability to make connections only to be slapped on the wrist when they had too many?

The top ten Super Connectors have all been denied access to their accounts. In fact, when you go to their pages it simply says, “Sorry, this profile couldn’t be displayed.” Most claim that their emails asking for help from LinkedIn have gone ignored.

Why Are Some Allowed More Than Others?

L.I.O.N: LinkedIn Open Networker. These people usually have the most connections, and currently it’s not known why some people are capped at thirty thousand while others aren’t.

I have nearly 30k connections and 8k open requests that I cannot accept. I use LinkedIn to advertise my business, Bikini Luxe, and to connect with like minded people. These days it’s all about who you know, not what you know.

When asked how they amassed such a following, Kakushadze said, “Painstakingly. You either receive a connection request or you send one. One at a time.”

Could This Happen to You?

We can only speculate as to what the motives are, but the vague wording of the LinkedIn Terms of Service leaves a lot to the imagination. According to Kakushadze he doesn’t market, advertise, or make any money from LinkedIn. His main purpose on the website is to popularize his research and spread knowledge.

His papers on quantum finance, cancer research, and theoretical physics make my head spin. Why anyone (or any Social Platform) would want to halt someone like him from educating others entirely for free is beyond me.

Steven Burda spent ten years carefully cultivating his LinkedIn connections and growing his business. Will people still be interested in attending his LinkedIn Workshops if he isn’t actually on the platform any longer?

What I have found is that this could happen to anyone, for any reason. What we are led to believe to be our virtual property is not really ours at all, and it can be taken away at any time.

In a world where who you are on Social Media is all that matters, when your popularity online grants you access to more clientele and deems you as valid, having that stripped away when you’ve worked hard to achieve it must be devastating.

Partnerships, Collaboration and Co-opetition: More Important Than Ever

A Strategy For Survival in Tough Times

In the simplest terms, the concept here is how a company can potentially increase both revenue and market share by executing a strategy to work with its direct or indirect competitor(s) to the benefit of both, a win-win.  The old Arab saying, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” also applies. It can also be as simple as joining an ad hoc collaboration among a group of companies or a standards group to create market order and simplicity from an overcrowded and confused market.  Customers invariably respond to products that provide the greatest value and paths to long-term increased value and cost reduction. Collaboration or “Co-opetition” is one of the most effective means to achieve that goal, particularly in an economic environment where “flat is the new up.”

Multibus: An Early Example of Collaboration Building A New Market

Soon after joining Intel, I learned about Intel’s concept of “Open Systems” and its “Multibus” system architecture.  Motorola was Intel’s primary competitor in microprocessors and so-called “single board computers” at that time.  Intel’s now legendary Marketing VP, Bill Davidow had developed a strategy to recruit other companies to support Multibus as an open system standard.  Davidow’s idea was to make Multibus more attractive to system designers by having a stable of compatible products from other companies supporting Multibus. It worked. Since that time the concept has evolved significantly and has played a major role in the development of many new markets. This post discusses some of the evolutionary changes, offers two high-tech case studies and some key requirements for successful collaboration.  It is more important now than ever as a survival strategy in a particularly challenging global economy.

The IBM Personal Computer Sets The Standard For The Future

Perhaps the best known high-tech example of an open system is the IBM Personal Computer, involving IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and thousands of other supporting companies. The result has been the creation of a huge new market, with over 400,000 applications for the PC, significant price competition, and interchangeable components from multiple vendors.  By contrast, Apple opted for a closed, proprietary system, which persists to this day, and continues to be a source of discontent from Apple customers: higher prices, as well as accessories and interfaces only available from Apple, etc. In sheer market share, the PC dominated at 85% of the total market, while Apple was forced to concentrate on niche markets like education and graphic design. I am not going to discuss the PC as it has been analyzed extensively over the years, though it does provide an excellent case study on the dynamics and market power of open systems versus closed proprietary systems.

 Important Current Co-opetition Successes: DSL And Android

I will discuss two other cases, one less well known and the other better known and more recent.  In the first case, I was personally involved so my experience enables me to speak in-depth on the topic.  Shortly after leaving Ascend Communications, I was called by a friend at Compaq/HP in Houston and asked to fly down to Houston for a private discussion with the VP of the Presario Division and his team.  The VP wanted to incorporate a high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) connection in the Presario out of the box.  The idea was that a consumer would connect the PC to a standard RJ11 telephone wall jack, and be instantly connected to the Internet.  However, I had to explain that the challenges to this were enormous. First and foremost the telephone companies themselves could not agree on the standard for how DSL worked. Equally problematic, the DSL market was fragmented with dozens of competitors offering different proprietary solutions.

We decided to proceed regardless, recognizing that if HP/Compaq were to succeed with their ingenious idea, it would require a fundamental change in the current DSL market and the telcos.  This could only be attempted if Compaq joined forces with Intel and Microsoft, and even then the outcome would be uncertain.  I contacted Ali Sarabi in Intel’s Architecture Labs, who admitted that Intel had been thinking of the same idea, and talking with Microsoft as well. So within two weeks all three companies met at Microsoft in Bellevue and the idea gained steam. Soon after we held three days of secret meetings in Atlanta with DSL companies, without explaining our purpose, and came away completely dejected. Bringing the competitors together was hopeless. They all pointed in a different direction. It then dawned on us that if we could get the telecom companies to agree on a single DSL standard, they could unite and as “the customers,” and therefore dictate to the DSL competitors what they would buy. Nothing works better than the opportunity to make money.

Another round of secret meetings in Seattle with the telecoms, and follow-up meetings around the country led to a breakthrough: the formation of a global consortium of over 100 telecom companies and DSL companies that culminated in the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva Switzerland creating a single global DSL standard, which eventually made the original Compaq Presario vision a reality.

Special Interest Group Legal Framework Paves The Way

One of the keys to this success was a simple legal framework for the companies to collaborate, known now as a “Special Interest Group,” avoiding any hint of unfair competition and ensuring that the technical aspects of the standard would be in the public domain. The SIG legal document has since been used in a number of other developments, notably Bluetooth and USB.  Other standards bodies, like the IEEE and IETF, are also structured similarly, enabling the creation of crucial collaborative projects like WiFi. These efforts are now a key aspect of many high-tech markets. Many companies devote entire teams to managing their participation in these standards bodies and ad hoc industry collaboration activities. Even on a small scale, some agreed framework, a Memorandum of Understanding or a simple one-pager may be required to achieve the necessary trust to move forward.

Android Repeats The IBM PC Phenomenon

The second case of successful global industry-wide collaboration is the Google Android smartphone operating system versus Apple IOS.  Once again, Android is an open architecture while Apple IOS is a closed proprietary system. Android has been adopted by a wide range of smartphone manufacturers, most notably Samsung, HTC, and Huawei. Despite the well-publicised popularity of Apple’s iPhone, the fact remains that Android, as an open architecture dominates the global smartphone market at 82% market share in 2015, as reported by International Data Corporation (IDC), and Apple again stuck in the 15% range.

Global Smartphone Market Share 2015 (IDC)

Two Failures To Collaborate: Videoconferencing And The Internet of Things

The video conferencing market has been around for nearly thirty years. Originally, there were big bulky proprietary systems. Cisco Systems later became a major player with its own impressive HD technology. In all, there were nearly a dozen major competitors addressing an “enterprise market” for business use only. The equipment was very expensive. Then along came Skype, WebEx, Apple Facetime and others. The problem is that, after thirty years, none of these competitors applications can talk with any other application. Clearly, this is a problem. So “middleware” startups have sprung up, offering a simple translation of otherwise incompatible video transmission protocols. Bluejeans technology is one excellent example. I have used it personally in my UBC classes to link a guest lecture on Skype to UBC’s corporate video conferencing system because there is no other way to do it. Is this the best solution or cost-effective. Absolutely not. Why, after thirty years, has the video conferencing industry failed to standardize?

In another case, the emerging new market buzzword is “The Internet of Things.” This means that everything in your home can and will be connected to the Internet. Sounds simple enough, right?  Not exactly.  Today the IoT market remains a complex, confusing Tower of Babble, with multiple competing communications protocols. Some products support WiFi, but there is no one single agreed way to communicate. A recent ZDNet post explains that home automation currently requires that devices need to be able to connect with “multiple local- and wide-area connectivity options (ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, RFID/NFC, GPS, Ethernet). Along with the ability to connect many different kinds of sensors, this allows devices to be configured for a range of vertical markets.” Huh?  This is the problem in a nutshell. You do not need to be a data communication engineer to get the point.   I have written here on this blog about this embarrassing failure to collaborate.

Summary

While the open architecture of the PC happened more or less organically, as so many companies were keen to get in on the action, the DSL problem was a hairball of enormous global complexity that had to be solved.  I am honored to have been part of that effort. Google’s decision to launch Android as an open architecture was more like Multibus, and the conscious strategic decision of Eric Schmidt and Larry Page to enter the market as an open system from the outset. Other examples in other industries abound and are documented in the now legendary book, Co-opetition.

The result in all three successful cases has been a dramatic market success. The key takeaway point is that in all three cases the open architecture created opportunity and expanded the market.  Industry collaborations like this are as relevant for smaller markets with only two or three competitors as for large complex markets.  Collaboration can be the key to company survival or failure.

Apocalypse now: has the next giant financial crash already begun?

This is one of the better mainstream media analyses on the growing concern regarding Global Financial Contagion.

Reblogged from The Guardian (UK) The author, Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. @paulmasonnews

Apocalypse now: has the next giant financial crash already begun?

http://gu.com/p/4dneh?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

‘The biggest risk is not deflation of a bubble. It is the risk of that becoming intertwined with geopolitics

The 1st of October came and went without financial armageddon. Veteran forecaster Martin Armstrong, who accurately predicted the 1987 crash, used the same model to suggest that 1 October would be a major turning point for global markets. Some investors even put bets on it. But the passing of the predicted global crash is only good news to a point. Many indicators in global finance are pointing downwards – and some even think the crash has begun.

Let’s assemble the evidence. First, the unsustainable debt. Since 2007, the pile of debt in the world has grown by $57tn (£37tn). That’s a compound annual growth rate of 5.3%, significantly beating GDP. Debts have doubled in the so-called emerging markets, while rising by just over a third in the developed world.

John Maynard Keynes once wrote that money is a “link to the future” – meaning that what we do with money is a signal of what we think is going to happen in the future. What we’ve done with credit since the global crisis of 2008 is expand it faster than the economy – which can only be done rationally if we think the future is going to be much richer than the present.

Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here’s why

David Graeber

This summer, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pointed out that certain major economies were seeing a sharp rise in debt-to-GDP ratios, which were well outside historic norms. In China, the rest of Asia and Brazil, private-sector borrowing has risen so quickly that BIS’s dashboard of risk is flashing red. In two-thirds of all cases, red warnings such as this are followed by a major banking crisis within three years.

The underlying cause of this debt glut is the $12tn of free or cheap money created by central banks since 2009, combined with near-zero interest rates. When the real price of money is close to zero, people borrow and worry about the consequences later.

Next, let’s look at the price of real things. Oil collapsed first, in mid-2014, falling from $110 a barrel to $49 now, despite a slight rebound in the interim. Next came commodities. Copper cost $4.50 a pound in 2011, but was half that in September. Inflation across the entire G7 is barely above zero, and deflation stalks the southern eurozone. World trade volumes have contracted tangibly since December 2014, according to the Dutch government index, while the value of global trade in primary commodities, which scored 150 on the same index a year ago, now stands at 114.

In these circumstances, the only way in which the expanding credit mountain can be an accurate signal about the future is if we are about to go through a spectacular productivity boom. The technology is there to do that, but the social arrangements are not. The market rewards companies that create labour exchanges for minicab drivers with multibillion-dollar valuations. Hot money chases after computing graduates with good ideas, but that is – at this phase of the cycle – as much an indicator of the stupidity of the money as the brightness of the ideas.

China – the engine of the post-2009 global recovery – is slowing markedly. Japan just revised its growth projections down, despite being in the middle of a massive money-printing programme. The euro zone is stagnant. In the US, growth, which recovered well under QE, has faltered after the withdrawal of QE.

In short, as the BIS economists put it, this is “ a world in which debt levels are too high, productivity growth too weak and financial risks too threatening”. It’s impossible to extrapolate from all this the date the crash will happen, or the form it will take. All we know is there is a mismatch between rising credit, falling growth, trade and prices, and a febrile financial market, which, at present, keeps switchback riding as money flows from one sector, or geographic region, to another.

A better exercise is to image what archetypes a dramatist might use if they tried to write a farce describing the state of society on the eve of yet another disaster. There would be a character obsessed with property: London is fizzing with young professionals trying to clinch property deals right now. The riverbanks of the Thames are forested with cranes, show apartments and half-occupied speculative developments that will, after the crash, make great social housing.

Then there would have to be a hapless central banker, optimistically “looking through” the figures for low growth, stagnant prices and collapsing trade in order to justify doing nothing.

But the protagonist would have to be a politician. The Kingston University economist Steve Keen points out that, in the run up to 2008, the flawed ideology of neoliberal economics made a dangerous situation worse. Economists put their professional imprimatur on the idea that risky investments were safe. Today, the stable door of economics is firmly shut. Even mainstream bank economists are calling for radical measures to revive growth: Nick Kounis, ABN Amro’s macro-economics chief, called on central banks to raise their inflation targets to 4% and flood the world with money in a coordinated survival strategy.

Instead, it is in the world of geopolitics that the danger of elite groupthink is clearest. The economic danger becomes clear if you understand that printing $12tn incentivises every country to dump the final cost of anti-crisis measures on someone else. But there is now also a clear geopolitical risk.

The oil price collapsed because the Saudis wanted to stymie the US fracking industry. Right now, although Russian and American diplomats are capable of sitting together in Vienna, their strike-attack pilots do not communicate as they attack their variously selected enemies on the ground in Syria. Europe, weakened by the Greek crisis, its cross-border institutions thrown into chaos by the refugee crisis, looks incapable of doing anything to anybody.

So, the biggest risk to the world, despite its growing seriousness, is not the deflation of a bubble. It is the risk of that becoming intertwined with geopolitics. Any politician who minimises or ignores this risk is doing what the purblind economists did in the run up to 2008.

Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. @paulmasonnews

Canadian Unicorn Hootsuite Valuation Written Down By Fidelity Investments

Talk on the street suggests that Hootsuite’s problems are not all related to the downturn in the larger venture capital and private investment markets. There has been criticism of HootSuite’s newest Dashboard iteration, the Hootsuite software design and development process in general, and rumors of stagnant revenue growth as competition has entered the market.  In  addition, there has been criticism of Holme’s personal leadership at Hootsuite, suggesting that he has been spending too much time on “cardboard desktops” and land deals, as the company’s problems have mounted.

In a related development which may suggest the further contraction of investor interest in startups with very large valuations, The Wall Street Journal today reported that many Wall Street mutual funds were reducing their exposure to startup investments. Historically, mutual funds have invested in high-risk startups only via well-known, reputable venture capital firms, who solict the mutual funds managers. However, recently,  and in the cases of some startups like Uber and Hootsuite, the mutual funds have taken direct investment positions. This appears to be ending, and venture capital firms may be hard pressed to attract to their own VC funds:

READ MORE: Mutual funds sour on startup investments

Canadian tech unicorn Hootsuite gets written down by Fidelity

GERRIT DE VYNCK

Reblogged From Bloomberg News

Published Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2016 5:31PM EST

Last updated Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2016 5:40PM ES

 Ryan Holmes, Founder & CEO of Hootsuite

Fidelity Investments cut the value of its stake in Hootsuite Media Inc., one of Canada’s most highly valued technology startups, in a sign that lowered U.S. investor expectations are making their way north of the border. The Boston asset manager wrote down its investment in Hootsuite, maker of social media marketing software, by 18 per cent.

Fidelity was the lead investor when Hootsuite raised $60-million in 2014. That financing round valued the Vancouver company at $1-billion, according to research firm CB Insights. Hootsuite is one of only two Canadian unicorns, the researcher said. The other is messaging app developer Kik Interactive Inc.

As startup financing begins to slow, investors have been reevaluating some of their portfolios. Like other fund managers, Fidelity periodically readjusts the value of its private stock holdings, based on a variety of factors, and is required to disclose the data publicly. The 18 per cent writedown of Hootsuite, from June to December, was disclosed in public filings.

Fidelity marked down its stakes in several corporate software startups in January, but it maintained high expectations for some social networking companies, including Pinterest Inc. and Snapchat Inc. With the writedown of Hootsuite, Fidelity values its holding below what it originally paid. Hootsuite didn’t immediately have a comment.

Last year, Hootsuite Chief Executive Officer Ryan Holmes said that an initial public offering was eventually in the cards but that he was focused at the time on increasing the company’s cash flow. Hootsuite hired a chief financial officer in October. Then it cut some employees in December.

Hootsuite said in October that more than 10 million people use its social media platform to help organize advertising campaigns, interact with customers or streamline their social media presence. The company also provides tools for businesses to produce content for their employees to share on their personal accounts. Hootsuite has said it’s raised at least $250-million since it was founded in 2008.

Facebook’s International Business Blunder: Following In The Footsteps of Google

With good intentions, and also a good dose of Facebook business strategy to expand its base of users, Mark Zuckerberg has struck out to promote Free Basics, a free limited Internet for the poor in less developed countries sponsored by Facebook and its local telecommunications partners. While on the face of it Free Basics would seem to have merit, Zuckerberg has run into a wall of opposition.  On close inspection of the details, Facebook’s problem, despite all of its global corporate sophistication, appears to be naïveté about the foreign markets it is trying to enter. It is possible to argue that Zuckerberg and Facebook have the best of intentions and sound arguments.  But the best of intentions and sound arguments mean nothing if the key element lacking is a clear understanding of the targeted foreign market, and the crucial need to adapt to it or fail.  Zuckerberg could have looked no further back than 2013 for clues to why he has failed.

In 2012 and 2013, I was involved in an effort to deploy wide area wireless Internet capability to broad swaths of India. This involved working with large Indian corporate partners. We were also working at a time when Google, Microsoft, and others were also busily competing to deploy so-called “white space Metro WiFi” to rural areas in lesser developed countries. Google was also experimenting with its “loon balloon” project to use high altitude balloons to deploy Internet access points in remote areas.  It quickly became clear to us that the Indian government and corporate officials wanted only an indigenous Indian Internet solution, which fit our strategy of working with Indian partners.  Google and the other big U.S. based companies were viewed as neo-colonialists. Ironically, on March 19, 2013, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote an editorial in The Times of India, “Which Internet Will India Choose,” in a well-intentioned effort to convince Indian leaders of the Google vision for the Internet in India.  For all intents and purposes, Schmidt’s editorial landed on deaf ears in India.  Also, regrettably, Indian corporate culture being what it is, not much happened on the Indian side to develop their own Internet deployment solution. All of this is not unusual in foreign markets.

Read more: Eric Schmidt: Which Internet Will India Choose?

As a veteran of high technology international business, I am intrigued by these international business blunders by otherwise very sophisticated business leaders and corporations.  They seem to repeat themselves over the years, sometimes in different ways and in different markets. Years ago I stumbled on David A. Ricks book, Blunders in International Business, now in its fourth edition, with new and updated case studies.  It is enlightening and also quite funny.  I recommend the book to Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg can’t believe Egypt  & India  aren’t grateful for Facebook’s free internet

The nerve. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

December 28, 2015Quartz India

All Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to do is make the world a better place for his new daughter. While he’s technically on paternity leave, he couldn’t sit idly by as India attempts to halt Internet.org, Facebook’s initiative to provide free but limited internet to the developing world.E

Last week, the Times of India reported that the country’s telecom regulatory body had asked Facebook’s partner, wireless carrier Reliance, to cease the Internet.org service as it determines whether operators should be able to price their services based on content. Responding to criticisms of the program, Zuckerberg penned an op-ed published Dec. 28 in the English-language daily. In it, he expressed annoyance that India is debating net neutrality—a principle dictating that telecom operators provide people with equal access to the internet—as the country struggles to connect its citizens to the internet.

In the process of defending Internet.org, Zuckerberg paints India—where about a billion people are not connected to the internet—as backwards for even daring to question the benefits of Facebook’s charity-like endeavor.

“Who could possibly be against this?” he asks passive-aggressively. “Surprisingly, over the last year there’s been a big debate about this in India.”

Yes, net neutrality is a big deal—and not just in India. In the US, for example, an appeals court is currently examining the legality of a new set of net-neutrality rules enacted by the Federal Communications Commission this year. But Zuckerberg almost portrays net neutrality as a first-world problem that doesn’t apply to India because having some service is better than no service.

Net neutrality activists have long argued that Internet.org provides a “walled garden” experience because the sites that users can access for free are determined by Facebook and its telecom partners, essentially making them gatekeepers to the internet for poor people.

While Zuckerberg acknowledges that Internet.org, which is currently active in more than 30 countries, does not provide people with access to the full web, he argues that it’s a step in the right direction. According to the Facebook CEO, half of the people who come online for the first time using Internet.org decide to pay for full internet access within 30 days.

Instead of wanting to give people access to some basic internet services for free, critics of the program continue to spread false claims–even if that means leaving behind a billion people.

Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim–falsely–that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.

Instead of welcoming Free Basics as an open platform that will partner with any telco, and allows any developer to offer services to people for free, they claim–falsely–that this will give people less choice.

Instead of recognizing that Free Basics fully respects net neutrality, they claim–falsely–the exact opposite.

Zuckerberg continues by offering an anecdote of a farmer named Ganesh, who uses the free internet service to check weather updates and commodity prices. “How does Ganesh being able to better tend his crops hurt the internet?” he asks rhetorically.

But examined more closely, his arguments don’t directly address the concerns of net neutrality activists. For the people who choose not to upgrade or can’t afford to pay for full internet access, Internet.org does indeed provide a walled garden of online content. Millions of people already have a skewed perception of the web, believing Facebook to be the internet, a Quartz analysis has shown.

Furthermore, while Facebook can add more telecom partners, which would theoretically open up the number of sites and services Internet.org users could access for free, it currently has only one partner in India, Reliance.

Zuckerberg also fails to address the claims that zero-rated services such as Internet.org amount to economic discrimination—that this is essentially poor internet for poor people. Furthermore, in an op-ed published in the Times of India in October, net-neutrality advocacy group Savetheinternet.in quoted Tim Berners-Lee, father of the internet, as saying: “Economic discrimination is just as harmful as technical discrimination, so [internet service providers] will still be able to pick winners and losers online.” Facebook’s walled garden could very well determine the sites and services that will succeed in India.

Over and over again, Zuckerberg has pointed to research showing that internet access can help lift people out of poverty. The fact remains that Internet.org provides limited, slow, and subpar access, and these limitations make it all the more difficult for people to climb the economic ladder. As Naveen Patnaik, chief minister of the Indian state Odisha, has said: “If you dictate what the poor should get, you take away their rights to choose what they think is best for them.”

Uber’s Distortion of the Sharing Economy

I found this important editorial opinion piece in The Guardian, the UK journal. The point of this is, IMHO, a critically important moral issue. Many of these new corporate entities, Uber in particular, when viewed without their sheep’s clothing, are doing nothing more than joining the global corporate drive to eliminate the middle class, local government control, and to nullify any opposition to their strategy of  unfettered capitalist dominance.  I almost cannot believe that I just wrote those words. Jeremy Rifkin’s Third Industrial Revolution has been distorted into a monster that is eating people’s livelihoods.

Uber and the lawlessness of ‘sharing economy’ corporates

Companies including Airbnb and Google compare themselves to civil rights heroes while using their popularity among consumers to nullify federal law

Travis Kalanick, Uber CEO. ‘Nullifying companies like Uber claim they are striking a blow against regulations they consider “out-of-date” or “anti-innovation” – their major innovation, however, is to undermine local needs and effective governance.’ Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan

In February, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky compared his firm’s defiance of local housing ordinances with that of Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule. Meanwhile, a tweeter compared Uber to Rosa Parks, defying unjust laws. Chesky quickly backed down after widespread mockery. Companies acting out of self-interest comparing themselves with the noble heroes of civil rights movements is as absurd as it is insulting.

But there is a better analogy from the US civil rights era for law-flouting firms of the on-demand economy. It’s just not the one corporate leaders claim. They are engaged in what we call “corporate nullification”, following in the footsteps of Southern governors and legislatures in the United States who declared themselves free to “nullify” federal law on the basis of strained and opportunistic constitutional interpretation.

Nullification is a wilful flouting of regulation, based on some nebulous idea of a higher good only scofflaws can deliver. It can be an invitation to escalate a conflict, of course, as Arkansas governor Orville Faubus did in 1957 when he refused to desegregate public schools and president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the law. But when companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Google engage in a nullification effort, it’s a libertarian-inspired attempt to establish their services as popular well before regulators can get around to confronting them. Then, when officials push back, they can appeal to their consumer-following to push regulators to surrender.

This happened just last week in New York City, when mayor Bill de Blasio moved to limit the number of Uber cars choking city streets during the heaviest hours of congestion. Uber pushed out advertisements voiced by celebrities including model Kate Upton and urged its wealthy users to write to city hall in protest. Mayor de Blasio stood down. Consistently, these nullifying companies claim they are striking a blow against regulations they consider “out-of-date” or “anti-innovation”. Their major innovation, however, is strategic and manipulative, and it’s meant to undermine local needs and effective governance.

Between 2005 and 2010 Google shot photos of much of the world – and many of its people – without permission for its Street View project, often pushing the limits of privacy laws along the way. In addition, Google hoovered up data from Wi-Fi networks that its cars passed through. To this day, Google has not explained why it captured all that private data. It worked. Despite some incidents in which Google had to reshoot the street scenes most regulators backed down because the public had grown used to the service or Google appeased them somehow.

Google’s strategy was to flip the defaults: Anyone who took issue with a shot on Street View was welcome to apply to have it removed. So it became our burden, not Google’s, to protect privacy. Google engaged in the same strategy of shoot (digital images) first and answer questions later when scanning copyrighted books. Some people got mad over these bold moves. Some people sued. Google worked through the conflicts later – sometimes by winning in court (as in the case of book scanning) and sometimes by losing rulings in Australia, South Korea, and Japan, and Greece, where Street View was ruled illegal in 2009.

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Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, puts on his seat belt gets into an Uber car after speaking at Thumbtack, an online startup in San Francisco. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

The analogy is most obvious in the case of an American civil rights law itself. Uber has ignored advocates for the blind, and other disabled persons, when they claim Uber’s drivers discriminate against them. In response to a lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind, Uber bluntly asserts that it’s merely a communication platform, not the type of employer meant to be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some judges and regulators accept that reasoning; others reject it. But the larger lesson is clear: Uber’s aggressive efforts to avoid or evade disability laws are nothing less than a form of corporate nullification, as menacing to the rule of law as defiance of civil rights laws in the days after courts ruled against racial segregation in the US.

In addition, Uber has confronted admittedly stifling restrictions on taxi driver licenses in France by launching a service called UberPop. Several authorities in Europe have ruled UberPop illegal, but Uber kept it operating anyway as it appealed. Now France has charged Uber’s general director for France, Thibaud Simphal, and the company’s director for Western Europe, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty with enabling taxi-driving by non-professional drivers and “deceptive commercial practices”.

One could make a strong argument that France would benefit from more taxi drivers and more competition. But that’s for the people of France to decide through their elected representatives. The spirit of Silicon Valley should not dictate policy for the rest of the world. New York, Paris, London, Cairo, and New Delhi all have different values and traffic issues. Local needs should be respected.

Consider what it would mean for such a universalising approach to prevail. The business model of Uber would become that of law-flouting bosses generally. Reincorporate as a “platform”, intermediate customer requests and work demands with an app, and voila!, far fewer laws to comply with. Worse, this rebel attitude signals to the larger culture that laws and regulations are quaint and archaic, and therefore hindrances to progress. That could undermine faith in republican government itself.

In the 1950s and 60s, Southern governors thought they’d found a similar tactic to avoid the civil rights laws that they most despised. Though the strategy failed, the idea still animates reactionaries. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, now running for president, has even suggested that the US supreme court’s recent gay marriage decision should effectively be nullified by sovereign states.

Of course, a republic can’t run without authorities who follow the rule of law. Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy firms now flouting basicemployment and anti-discrimination laws would like us to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance, rather than segregationists’massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful, nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”.

As Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel has demonstrated, the goal of tech firms is not to compete – it is to so monopolise a sector that they basically become synonymous with it. Uber’s and Airbnb’s self-reinforcing conquests of markets attract more venture capital (VC) investment, which in turn enables more conquests, which in turn attracts more VC money. As that concentration of economic power continues apace, it’s more vital than ever to dispute Silicon Valley oligarchs’ self-aggrandising assertions that they follow in the footsteps of civil rights heroes.

As allegedly “innovative” firms increasingly influence our economy and culture, they must be held accountable for the power they exercise. Otherwise, corporate nullification will further entrench a two-tier system of justice, where individuals and small firms abide by one set of laws, and mega-firms create their own regime of privilege for themselves and power over others.

Frank Pasquale is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the author of Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015).

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of The Googlization of Everything – and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011).